On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 9:23 AM, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > I went through a period of trying to make sure my code worked on > Windows, but I've given up. Not because it's hard to do - it generally > isn't - but the complete lack of a reasonable set of tools* on Windows, > which just makes me angry whenever I have to touch the blasted thing, > made me stop. > > * starting with a useable shell and editor, documentation, and remote > text-based access. No doubt it doesn't help that I have no need for > Windows, either personally or professionally, so have no motivation > to put the effort into learning it.
Definitely the lack of remote text based access makes it harder. But for anyone willing to run Windows in a virtual machine, it's not terribly hard anymore. Personally, I use VirtualBox on Ubuntu with a Windows 7 guest. I suggest WinXP if you have old licenses kicking around, as it's a little less annoying about validation and such. Gabor has made it really easy to get Padre and Strawberry Perl together: http://padre.perlide.org/download.html I also note that gvim runs wonderfully on Windows: http://www.vim.org/download.php#pc -- if you prefer that over Padre, then you only need to install Strawberry Perl: http://strawberryperl.com/ When I was working on Windows regularly, the regular cmd.exe shell worked well enough once I added a bunch of ported gnu programs to my path: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ -- that let me keep typing "ls", "cp", "mv" etc. IMPORTANT -- be sure to rename/delete all of the tar/zip programs because they are buggy and you don't want your CPAN config finding them. You also need to rename any that conflict with windows programs (I seem to recall "find" I renamed to "myfind" or something like that.) If you use git for source control and want to use it to get your code onto the windows box, I recommend using TortoiseGit: http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/ Best of luck! -- David
